2019 | University of derby | Computer Science Year 2

This week will be the final week I blog every day as the work load has greatly increased leading to me not having enough time to maintain this blog, instead I will post on Monday, Wednesday and Friday in order to reduce the workload I have to deal with. Today I worked on porting a MySQL database over to access and developed a front end for it. This was the final tutorial that had exercises before I move onto just developing my database for my assessment. Further, I researched more about my placements into companies covering the subject of Autonomous Vehicles, I've applied to 5 companies covering this subject.

In the test I managed to score 66%. This is slightly below what i expected, but I know that some of the answers I got wrong, I simply got confused by the wording. From this I am going to change my method of revision and greatly increase the amount I do daily, I will take this over to my next test in Databases. For the remainder of the day I got my directional lighting fully working with minimal lighting glitches. I am now nearly finishing the book "make it stick the science of learning", but I don't have much time to read so my reading has greatly decreased.

I spent my day revising for the upcoming Graphics and Databases tests. The graphics test covers the theory behind all the rendering we have been doing for the last 4 weeks, with a heavy focus on week 6's matrix theory. For databases, I need to cover E/r diagram theory and a large amount of SQL syntax (not specific to any DBMS such as PostgreSQL). For this I am building a quiz-let library of questions as in my study of learning theory, a large majority of studies suggest that testing is a much more effective method for practicing retrieval ( the method of putting time between practice so revision is more difficult ). So far I have found quiz-lets' user interface slightly frustrating, but I'm getting used to it.

Today I spent my time finishing off the back faced culling and sorting. I created the "calculate backfaces" method to the Model class which sets the cull value to true or false. After this was applied and was working I applied the method to sort polygons by z depth. The reason for this is to assure that the furthest back polygons are drawn first, and the closest are drawn on top of them. C++ has a built in <algorithm> package that uses quick sort organise collections. with this I had to implament a > operator as the iterator did not know which value to compare in the instance.

Today we were given the task of applying back faced culling to our rendering engine. I spent the session figuring out the tasks that were required of me to complete this addon. The major steps are adding a vector class to the program, this class would need to store a vector [x, y, z] and, to be able to calculate the cross product and dot product of 2 vectors. These would be used for figuring out which faces need to be marked for "culling" (if they are going to be drawn or not). Once I figured all this out I build the class and applied it to the Model class. By the time I did this I ran out of time so I had to pack up and go to my Networks tutorial. In this I build a virtual Diffy Helman key exchange. This was using 2 classes to mirror the effects of a network. A clear which contained 2 node classes that represented the client and the server. These classes passed and received values from the "clear". The final result was a working Diffy Helman key exchange.

Today I focused on reading the main module book for Graphics 1 (essential mathematics for Computer games and interactive applications). This was because I felt that I had a mid level understanding of what I was doing but  there were some aspects that I could apply but not explain with ease. I mainly read into the viewing pipeline and why each step is performed at each point. I read around 50 pages of this book, by the end I was 100% confident with the theory of the pipeline.